Patrice

Who they are

Natasha Reverde’s son, fathered in the summer of 1990 by the commune’s ex-KGB man, Ivor Fedchenko, known as Yevgeny, and left behind at Les Arbres when she went to Paris. He was raised there with the other boys, learned to shoot in the fields around the house, and was still the child in the last photograph his mother has of him at ten. He travels on a cold-body passport in the name Paul Wayne — one of the two further identities Diana Taverner reports missing — and takes his instructions from Frank Harkness, who has given them to him since he was a toddler.

He is the most professional killer in Spook Street and the least curious. Two hours in a library opposite Elite Enquiries, an Americano going cold, waiting for a private detective to walk past: the patience is professional, and so is the violence that interrupts it, a drunk and then a traffic warden put through windows inside what the narration calls the two-second grace that follows unexpected violence. He wears thin leather gloves to a killing. He counts the corners left. He notices that the professionals following him would have separated by now, and is contemptuous of the woman who points a gun at him and shouts, because “people who shout orders are not the people who shoot”.

What he is not is a blank. He cries, briefly, in a layby for Bertrand. He punishes himself for thinking that Frank should have known what Yves would become. Told that Les Arbres has burned, he assumes it can be rebuilt and that the others will return, and nobody corrects him. Spook Street’s cruellest detail is the discipline he was raised under: on his twelfth birthday he was locked in the cellar and kept there until he asked to be freed, and he lasted a month — longer than Bertrand, less than Yves.

What they want

Stated, such as he states anything: to complete the job. His reports are couched as deliveries — “package still undelivered”, “will attempt redelivery” — and his first concern in the layby is not that Bertrand is dead but that the parcel was probably never delivered. The vocabulary is his controller’s, and it does the work of making a murder into a logistics problem.

What Spook Street shows him working for is approval from the only authority he has ever had, and the repair of his own record after two failures. He tells River there is always a plan, and the plan he is given at the Embankment is to walk into a building full of people and kill all of them, which he sets about doing with a stolen gun and no apparent doubt.

Book 4 — Spook Street

• C06 — In a layby, with a map he does not need spread across the seat, he concludes that Bertrand’s attempt on the old man failed, is told to try again, cries briefly and drives back to London.
• C07 — Offstage, described by his mother: born in 1990, left behind when she fled, last photographed at ten, a name she wants news of.
• C08 — Hunts Sam Chapman across South London as Paul Wayne, spooking him deliberately so that he will bolt, breaking his knee with a crowbar, and escaping when Marcus Longridge drives a cab through the garage gates.
• C10 — Reports the undelivered package, learns from Frank that Bertrand’s passport has surfaced, rams the car on Pentonville Road, disarms Emma Flyte and forces River Cartwright away at gunpoint.
• C11 — Moves River by taxi and tube, hits him when the questioning goes too far, and asks him what the dazzle ship is and where to find it.
• C12 — Delivers River to Frank on the Embankment, is briefed out of earshot, kisses River on the cheek and is given Aldersgate Street with orders to kill everyone there.
• C13 — Remembers the cellar, comes in through the back door and shoots his way up through Slough House: kills Chapman, breaks the office barricades, and is stopped by a whisky bottle thrown into his temple. The killing of Marcus Longridge is implied — Marcus is found shot through the head — but never shown.
• C14 — Cuffed to a radiator with his jaw wrecked by Jackson Lamb; Catherine Standish talks Shirley Dander out of shooting him, and JK Coe takes the gun and fires three times into his chest.

Tells

The map spread out that he does not need to read. The leather gloves pulled on before the work starts. Hands in pockets in the rain, counting corners. The kiss on both cheeks for Frank, and on River’s cheek as a goodbye. And the courier’s language — package, delivery, redelivery — which is how a man raised in a house full of tradecraft talks about murder.

Open questions

Whether he understood that River was Frank’s son, or only that he had Bertrand’s face. Whether the two failures were, as he tells himself, luck and weather. What he expected to happen after Aldersgate Street, since Frank’s order included no way out. And whether anyone ever told Natasha Reverde what became of him — Spook Street does not.